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@Blakbird, I suppose it's a good thing to act upon the reduced interest you're experiencing. Better than to keep you're house stocked with a valuable collection you don't do anything with. I feel tempted to buy my own MOC .

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I don't think it's reduced interest, but an inability by most to buy large quantities. I'm sure blakbird would get a fortune for his stuff if he set up a BL shop, I know I'd certainly buy a couple things off him. But 100k parts in one go, no.

So unless he lowballs so much of his work, the stuff is unlikely to fly out of the house. But that might be good, it makes me sad to see such a collection broken up. It should be (in) a museum.

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Both of these are about right. The collection is totally out of control. It fills many rooms in my house and also my garage and attic. I need to make some space and recover some money from my large investment. I am not totally getting out of LEGO, just getting out of the "historical collector" market and into something more reasonable, just keeping a few of my favorites. I spent about 15 years putting this collection together, and I'm a bit burned out.

My hobbies have ebbed and flowed over the years. About 15 years ago I had a business making custom telescope kits. I was also heavily into high power rocketry for a while. I did the RC airplane thing, and then helicopters. Then I was building Pocher models. At the moment I'm into scale RC trucks. Way back I even used to rebuild my own car engines. I did woodworking for a while too. It is too expensive and takes too much space to do them all at once, so I am backing down on LEGO for a while. I'm sure the pendulum will swing back in time. You can see a common thread here, and it is building things. One way or another, I need to be making mechanical things work.

Not feeling sorry for you as you honestly have too many toys (unless you're actually Elon Musk, then iI'll happily shut up), but having so many hobbies is not really possible for a normal human being. It's not the money, it's the time baby

Anyway, I hope you'll make a killing on those sets. You deserve it Eric - and MANY THANKS for Technicopedia

Also have a Tamiya Konghead waiting for this weekend. I love Tamiya, but I (and the wifey) says only ten cars, buy one, sell one ... such is (my) life ..

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Have you kept the boxes for your sets? On eBay I see many sets being sold already built btw.

I have the boxes for more than half of them, and certainly for anything newer than 2005. For the older sets I collected them whether they had a box or not, so I kept the boxes when I had them. Probably 50 or so have no box. In most cases people do not want to pay to ship the boxes so they will end up getting thrown out.

19 hours ago, Johnny1360 said:

I hope this is not out of line but what part of the country do you reside?

I am in the Seattle, Washington area.

11 hours ago, Aleh said:

May I ask you to to make a couple of actual photos of your incredible MOC's and Technic set's collection?

10 hours ago, J_C said:

@Blakbird before you sell, split it, perhaps make an event. I mean something like invite photographers, youtubers. Make a proper documentation. Throw a farewell party, show, exhibition. Maybe...

10 hours ago, Lipko said:

Someone should arrange an exhibition of the collection. I think you could keep the collection for another 2-3 months and that's enough to arrange one

There are a couple of problems with an exhibition idea. First, at least half of the sets are boxed and not available for display anyway. That also means I can't take photos of everything, but if you go to my Bricksafe you can see pictures of everything I have. Second, hardly anyone in the USA cares about Technic so no one would come.

9 hours ago, neepheid said:

Will you be continuing with the Technicopedia?

I'm not sure. Without the sets I can't take pictures. I could go 100% digital, but a lot of the commentary can only come from building the model first. I will at least leave the web site up in its current state.

11 hours ago, schraubedrin said:

I always hoped to come to America one day to visit "Blakbirds Technic Museum"

On a related note @Blakbird: Have you considered asking a museum to buy it from you?

10 hours ago, anatem said:

It should be (in) a museum.

6 hours ago, Interceptor said:

Sad to hear that...agree with the comment that this collection should be placed in a LEGO Technic historical museum.

That's actually a very interesting idea. I have found a museum and I am discussing the matter with the curator. However, I'm not sure I would get much of any money for them this way, but it would be a pleasant way to preserve everything.

6 hours ago, 1974 said:

Anyway, I hope you'll make a killing on those sets. You deserve it Eric - and MANY THANKS for Technicopedia

10 hours ago, anatem said:

I'm sure blakbird would get a fortune for his stuff if he set up a BL shop,..... the stuff is unlikely to fly out of the house.

Sadly, it is looking like it will be difficult to sell these sets at all, much less make a killing. I had to import almost everything from Europe and there is very low interest here. I already have a Bricklink shop but the sets are not getting any interest.

6 hours ago, 1974 said:

Also have a Tamiya Konghead waiting for this weekend. I love Tamiya, but I (and the wifey) says only ten cars, buy one, sell one ... such is (my) life ..

The Konghead is awesome! Have fun with it. Check out my RC site to see the upgrades I made to it which really helped the handling.

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Sad to see this happen. End of an era IMO. Would love to buy a MOC or two from you but prices for them are much easier to be swallow when split up into Bricklink orders rather than upfront . Best of luck with the sale

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Looks like I've opened Pandora's box here. You should see my PM inbox. Some of the confusion is my own fault for not putting more information in the original post. To clarify, I am NOT looking to sell individual sets one by one here on Eurobricks. That would be a lot more work than selling them on Bricklink and I'm trying to save effort here, not add more. What I was looking for was a buyer for some considerable chunk of sets (at least $500), or for the MOCs which can't really be sold on Bricklink. With that in mind, I'll put a list below of all the MOCs that I have currently available for sale along with the designer of each to help you understand which is which. The "Value" column is just a straight export from a Brickstore parts list of the average Bricklink price of the parts alone. This serves as a good starting point for negotiation. Please feel free to make an offer on any of these MOCs. If you are interested in sets, please choose a group of sets worth at least $500. I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't a single person actually interested in that number of sets, but it can't hurt to try.

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Reading "PM me for this and that", "how much for this and that" is just - horrible. Do you actually need the money possibly coming out of this? If so, then do it.

If not ... when you are thinking about storage space, about putting some activities on hold (I never ever could believe what you were doing - but you were simply doing it!) ... don't sell your collection.

I have no idea what to say, but people are launching kick-starter projects - and repeatedly get support - for ... most volatile things.

Crowd funding is possibly a way of just conserving what you have assembled - monetary wise, but >much much more so<, intellectually wise. I am not that concerned about your collection thinning. I am much more concerned about your saying that when your collection is dissolving, you may also have to cut back on your activities and may not be able to conserve and improve your LEGO "knowledge". And this is not - never - "payable". It is not.

Don't sell your collection.

All the best
Thorsten

P.S.: I have never supported any "project" with money. I would do it in this case.

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Crowd funding is possibly a way of just conserving what you have assembled - monetary wise, but >much much more so<, intellectually wise.

Thanks for your thoughts. Given that in all the years I've had a "donate" button on Technicopedia I've collected less than $50, it is hard to imagine anyone contributing anything toward maintaining my collection in return for ..... nothing. The main payback I've gotten from Technicopedia is all the comments from people who enjoyed it. Those mean a lot to me, but they don't pay the bills. I've amassed a lot of knowledge from having built all those sets, but it had to end somewhere. I can't keep buying every new set year after year and just pack them into my garage forever. It would be cool to keep adding to Technicopedia as new sets come out, but it just doesn't seem feasible. Of course, it wasn't feasible for me to do what I've already done, but reality had to catch up with me sooner or later.

In the back of my mind I always imagined someday renting a large retail space and just setting up every set and MOC and calling it a museum. Realistically, I would never have time for such a thing unless I quit my job, and even then it would never make enough to even pay the rent in the USA. It was a good dream though.

I'm glad that I was able to share my passion for this hobby to the extent that I have and I won't forget all the like minded people around the world with which I was able to share.

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You are smart, you should know that most of the fun of your collection is the collecting and building itself. So selling of build models will be very hard, even in groups of models with discount.
I'm afraid your best option to see some of the investments back is to add all separate parts to your/a Bricklink store. That's a huge amount of work but so is all communication with people that want your models at bottom price, most probably because they have knowledge about the parts that went into it and do the math. That's sad enough but that's how people tick.

Edited February 1, 2018 by Berthil

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Thank you for clarifying your intent, and sorry for cluttering up the thread with a PM request. I'm not sure which USA-based copy of 8480 on Bricklink is yours, but they're all well out of my budget. Best of luck selling things off.

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I'm afraid your best option to see some of the investments back is to add all separate parts to your/a Bricklink store. That's a huge amount of work...

Adding parts to bricklink is actually pretty easy if he has or can get the XML file from rebrickable.

The massive time consuming part is taking them apart when orders start rolling in. Then having everything organized so you can find parts quickly. IMO having a bricklink store with 500k parts is ALOT of work.

If it were me, I would sell the models assembled (assuming it's assembled) as that's the least amount of work.

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If it were me, I would sell the models assembled (assuming it's assembled) as that's the least amount of work.

That's what Eric is trying to do.

With adding to bricklink I of course also meant breaking apart the models and store all parts categorized for selling. Otherwise no sense in adding to bricklink if you don't have the parts readily available for shipping.
The financial value of a model lies in it's parts, the emotional value is in collecting parts and building and that cannot be monetized.
I also see from Erics list he has sold off most of the Akiyuki GBC's (or keeps the rest) and he doesn't sell the RoscoPC F1 models.
Nevertheless @Blakbird, I hope you succeed in 'liquidating' the assets you want to get rid off in an easy way.

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I also see from Erics list he has sold off most of the Akiyuki GBC's (or keeps the rest) and he doesn't sell the RoscoPC F1 models.

Yes, most of the GBCs are already gone. Luckily I found good homes for most of them. The RoscoPC models actually don't belong to me. I built and stored them for another AFOL in a somewhat unconventional gentleman's agreement.

It's fascinating to see how much other people know about my collection, surmising what is missing from my list!

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I have no idea how the economics work out, but perhaps you could attend Brickcon as a vendor, and then display and sell significant parts of your MOC collection? You'd probably need to figure out a way to take credit cards ...